///Former Court of Appeal judge Datuk Shaikh Daud Ismail should not have compromised his stature by allowing himself to be dragooned by Barisan Nasional propagandists to run down Teoh Beng Hock’s family and lawyers for the family’s decision to withdraw from the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Teoh’s mysterious death at the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) headquarters in Shah Alam in July 2009.

Another example of such a media blitzkrieg was the comment by the Universiti Teknologi Mara Assoc Prof of Law Datuk Halim Sidek.///–Kit

If an ordinary lay person believes what was spoken by the two persons, then one might conclude that he is simple minded, and is easily swayed by the emotion to support the government because government servants were mainly Malays. But one is a professor who is expected to have a mind that can think for himself. If a brain of that category is biased by racial emotion, then god help the country in the students he will train until his retirement day. The other person held the position of the Judge in the Court of Appeal. He is among the top echelon in the legal profession and he should have the brain that is capable of differentiating between right and wrong. Had he held his silence, we cannot suspect him based on his ethnicity. But the words he uttered cast doubts on cases that went before him, particularly when it involves the government and non-Malays.

People are awaiting changes for the better when the Malays are better educated; the affirmative actions were needed because they were said to be inferior and education must have been one of the area. But academic qualification that made the two professionals did not make them promising leaders of a developed nation. It looks like time will not help Malaysia arrive at a socially developed nation.

Forensic pathologist Dr Prashant Naresh Singh told the Commission of Enquiry into the death of Teoh Beng Hock and said: “ It is important to understand the mechanism of friction of an impact. For a person to be thrown out of the window (referring to a particular window on the 14th floor of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission), Teoh could not have been unconscious.”—The Star 2 March 2011

That statement was not specific as to when was Teoh becoming conscious. Teoh had to be conscious if he climbed the window and then jumped. But if he was thrown out, Teoh could either be conscious or unconscious. If he was unconscious when he was carried to the window, made to squat on the windowsill, and then thrown out of the window, Teoh could either be conscious or unconscious. Unless Dr Prashant believed that while falling Teon rubbed his body against part of the building and that revived his consciousness. Dr Prashant Singh would be jumping to conclusion to claim that an unconscious person would regain consciousness if he did not know the condition of Teoh before his fall, and he could not even determine the frictional force against Teoh on his way down. Dr Prashant needed to assume that Teoh was conscious to advance his theory on proving that Teoh jumped on his own.

Dr Prashant concluded that Teoh jumped on his own based on the circumstance evidence of the finger print on the window and the ‘scratch marks on both the shoes which co-related with the width of the window sill.

It is not obvious to Dr Prashant that unlike a signature, a person needs not be conscious to have his fingerprint affixed to the window pane. Also a person can squat on the windowsill and he could also be placed on the windowsill to have the same scratches made. The two pieces of information could not be the basis to draw his conclusion.

Another forensic pathologist Dr Khairul Azman Ibrahim said that the fully open window, (on the particular one Teoh BH was said to have exited) was wide enough for one person to fall. He added that the spot where Teoh’s body landed was ‘a bit’ too far from the wall.

If the window which was hinged on top was push wide open, at say 45 degree, then the distance between the edge of the window and the wall is the height of the window time 1/sqrt 2. If the window is 4 feet tall, the horizontal distance at the lower edge of the window to the wall would be 2.83 feet. The clearance of the window, the height of the window above the windowsill was 1.17 feet. For something to be thrown out of the window, horizontally, beyond the limit of the window, the height of the body should not exceed 1.2 feet. So to throw anything further from the 1.17 feet while it reaches the ground, the body had to be lowered, to clear the window and then thrown out. With this elementary calculation MACC would soon advance the theory that Teoh actually climbed over the window with both his hands clinging on to the windowsill, facing the building, and then used the legs to push out, like a swimmer diving in a pool. If the person was dropped, he would be found near the base of the building.

At 14th floor, the window was about 100 feet above the floor where the body was found. It took about 2.5 second for the body to hit the ground at the speed of 55 miles per hour. The speed where Teoh was thrown out equals the distance divides 2.5 second. There was no shoe mark on the wall to suggest that Teoh did a swimmer’s backward plunge, and he could not be found more than 1.17 feet away from the wall if he did not hit the window while jumping. The conclusion is most probably more than one person was involved in lowering Teoh until his body cleared the extended window pane before he was thrown out of the window. They did it believing that Teoh had died, or closed to dying. They had the presence of mind to ensure that Teoh’s fingerprint appear on the window pane and the marks of the windowsill on the shoes. The idea was to make Teoh look like having committed suicide, and now the government is acting on the script.

by Loh on Friday, 4 March 2011 – 2:44 pm
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Still waiting.

by Loh on Friday, 4 March 2011 – 2:44 pm
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A different issue now.

Dr Prashant Singh said that the mark on the neck which Dr Pornthip referred to as the pre-fall injuries was a ‘mark left over after the first autopsy’. Dr Prashant Singh concluded that if that was the injury, then it would have implied that Teoh was unconscious and he could not have walked and squatted on the windowsill and dropped down to the floor nine stories below. Dr Prashant Singh came to the right conclusion as Dr Pornthip except that he did not believe Teoh was unconscious because Teoh had his legs touched the ground first, and hence Teoh must have been conscious. It is just like a person chooses to trim his feet so that he could make the shoes fit his feet.

If the mark taken by Pornthip as a sign of injuries was sad to be a autopsy mark left after the autopsy was first performed, why should the mark be left so fortunately at the crucial point which have aroused controversy? Was that a pure coincidence that the mark had to be left at the vital spot which important conclusion could have been drawn. A conspiracy theory would have it that there was an injury mark on Teoh’s neck, and it would have been inconvenience to leave it there to argue that the person was conscious, to correlate it with the theory that legs which touched the ground first must mean Teoh was conscious during the fall. To remove the doubt, something was applied on that particular spot as a precaution to explain why the injury mark did not exist.

Dr Pornthip was not allowed to touch the body, and we do not know how near she was allowed to the body. It is quite convenient now to say that Pornthip noted the appearance but not what had been hidden below, if indeed a chemical compound did apply over that crucial spot.

The not so technical answer has to be found whether Teoh could have lowered himself to do a somersault to clear the hanging window pane so that his body could be found ‘a bit far’ from the wall.

Teoh’s body touched the ground at 74 KPH and not 120 KPH as Dr Prashant Singh said. A pre-U student would be able to work the mathematics.